"Under the authority of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, administration officials had devised a plan under which the US military’s counter-Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) force would remain in Syria at least until the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad went through with UN-backed elections. On top of their Congressionally-mandated mission of fighting IS, US forces would continue to deny Assad access to Syrian oilfields, which were located in areas controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters backed by the United States, and to obstruct the Iranian military’s access to the Levant.
Trump didn’t like it. “The president was very uncomfortable with our presence in Syria,” Jeffrey told Al-Monitor in a two-hour interview at his home in Washington last week. “He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars.”" al-monitor
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This guy likes to talk. Hopefully he will hang himself in the coils of the rope he is weaving.
The gist of this is that he has a deep seated hatred for the Syrian Government and an exaggerated sense of self-importance. His globalist strategic thinking fit together nicely with Pompeo's simple minded evangelical devotion to Israel and its self fulfilling 1% fantasies. They were a deadly duo hatched out in hell.
As for General McKenzie's claim that numerical accounting for troops is not fiddled with at the Pentagon, I hope he is lying and not just another simpleton. All through the Afghanistan War the DoD lied about how many people we had in Afghanistan. They did this by counting people who were arriving and leaving, people on temporary assignment, people on leave, etc. etc. pl
Anyone who glosses over the Siege of Kobani like it was just a minor event troubles me. To me an ally is somewhat more than anyone I’m forced into relationship with just b/c we may have mutual enemies.
Giving Erdogan cart blanche to obliterate some of the oldest Christian communities on the Kurdish border sickened me.
Situations change & we seem to be very slow in adjusting to some changes.
pat – you have a bunch of liars or worse following thru with an agenda that is in service to israel… at what point do the american people realize that russia and china are much lesser evils then the one the usa has been supporting non stop – israel?? it is not a whole lot different in canada, with the exception we have no weight to throw around…
James, Oh the hegemony of little Israel getting the big U.S. to
do all it’s dirty work. How about some explanation of exactly how your comments are germane to this post. Friction between Iran &
Turkey (must be Israel’s fault, huh?) Erdogan’s hated of the Kurds,
then again according to your comments we know who to blame for that. The cold shoulder between Syria & the Gulfies, we know where
that chilly atmosphere comes from, right James?
If Israel just disappeared guess the Iranians, Turks & Arabs would
just have a perpetual love fest, right? I suspect you’ve just been holding in your anti-Israeli comments & couldn’t hold them in any longer & decided to just blame the entire mess on them.
I’ve read that entire interview from top to bottom, and every one of Jeffrey’s justifications for doing what he has been doing should be met with a shrug and a “so what’s that to do with us?” from any American.
Because try as I might his justifications appear to be that This Is What Israel Wants, So I Went Out Of My Way To Get It For Them.
Honestly, that’s pretty much it.
@ elaine … my comments as i see it elaine are very germaine to this thread… when one considers the words and actions of jefferies and pompeo as being very much subservient to israel, they don’t need to go much further to appreciate what i am saying…
the usa tries to use turkey as a wedge to pump up erdogans concept of himself as the next sultan… my understanding is turkey and iran are on much better terms then either of these countries with israel… i am sorry if you find my viewpoint challenging.. the usa’s presence in syria, along with all the work on the part of usa and israel to create a kurdish state are not happening .. the results they’d hoped for have come to not… sooner or later the usa needs to get out of syria and stop being a constant servant to israel… having jefferies or pompeo in power is counter productive to the usa’s best interests….
Elaine,
Do you have any real skin in this game-like a child in combat service in the M.E? Could you state what this child is fighting for?
To understand what the izzies are up to in the M.E, you might read about PNAC (https://pnac.info/ ), or the manifesto for “A Clean Break” (http://www.dougfeith.com/docs/Clean_Break.pdf ) . Crooke’s analysis of the issue (https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/17/lost-on-the-dark-side-in-syria/ ) might also be helpful.
James is correct. The izzies have been losing pawns in this game-and will continue to lose even more powerful pieces unless they can get the USA to fight for them (https://www.europereloaded.com/reasons-netanyahus-panic-alastair-crooke/ ). Even then, their victory might not be to their liking. These issues have been discussed in SST for a very long time.
Ishmael Zechariah
Our host some time back alluded to a scene from one of Patrick O’Brian’s novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, in which the captain, Jack Aubrey, tells the surgeon, Stephen Maturin, ‘Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils.’
(The clip from the film version is on ‘Youtube’, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4PzpxOj5Cc.)
Perhaps one might say that a central problem with the ‘One Percent Doctrine’ is that it ignores the ‘Principle of the Lesser Weevil.’
What Dick Cheney said, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, was:
‘If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.’
This is close to gibberish – what actually does it mean to ‘treat it as a certainty in terms of our response’?
What is however clear is that the argument presupposes that there exists a ‘response’, such that the attempt to eliminate a very low probability of an absolutely catastrophic event does not involve very much higher probabilities of consequences which, although less apocalyptic, are quite serious enough: and indeed, cumulatively, may be catastrophic.
Certainly there are cases where decisive ‘preventive’ action may be the ‘lesser weevil.’
But the reason why to say ‘it’s not about our analysis’ is foolish is that it is unwise to take it for granted that this is so, without a sober look at the ‘weevils’ such action may risk.
And here, what his Wikipedia entry has to say about Jeffrey’s role in Iraq is grimly amusing.
Having noted that he was selected by Colin Powell and John Negroponte, in 2004, to ‘bridge the transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’, it describes what happened after his return there as Obama’s appointee in 2010:
‘Jeffrey oversaw its expansion into the largest Embassy in the world with almost 16,000 employees and an annual budget of over $6 billion, and worked with the U.S. military to ensure a successful transition to a civilian lead. According to Voice of America, after this successful transition, Iraq is now increasingly coming under the control of Iran.’
And this outcome of the decisions Cheney and his like took illustrates one of the problems with the ‘One Percent Doctrine.’
If you announce that you are happy to ‘lash out’, without balancing the ‘weevils’ of alternative courses of action, there will always be people, like the late Ahmed Chalabi, apparent ‘agent-of-influence’ of Iran, who will know how to exploit this.
So, people in Washington and London were not only encouraged by him, and his like, to view the potential threat from WMD in Iraq in quite unrealistically apocalyptic terms; they were also blinded to the possibility that one of the ‘weevils’ resulting from toppling Saddam might be the creation of a ‘Shia Crescent.’
And then, the same people rushed into the attempt to destroy what they had been instrumental in creating by toppling Bashar Assad – with just as little serious thought about some of the ‘weevils’ involved.
A further problem is that, when people have made miscalculations on the scale of those in which Ambassador Jeffrey and his like have been involved, from their point of view, the ‘weevils’ involved in recognising their errors and seeking to correct them are, very commonly, much greater than those of ‘doubling down.’